


The Results of Copyright Term Extension

by Sheogorath



Category: Original Work
Genre: AR, Autism, CTEA 1976, Gen, US IP law, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 19:22:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheogorath/pseuds/Sheogorath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Autistic preteen finds out first hand why copyright term extension is such a bad idea, a lesson the US Government seems to be unable to learn!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Results of Copyright Term Extension

**Author's Note:**

> The first line of this story was taken from a competition run by The First Line magazine. Other than that, it is 100% my own.

## The Results of Copyright Term Extension.

Sometimes, when it's quiet, I can remember what my life was like before moving to Cedar Springs. Although I lived near Universal City in the Toluca Lake area of Burbank in Southern California, my life was anything but the chaos you might imagine it to have been. My parents had originally moved to Los Angeles with the idea of my mom getting an acting job, but after months of unsuccessful auditions, the fact that I was on the way was discovered, and while my dad got a job as a dolly grip for Warner Brothers, Mom decided to concentrate on raising me, and she put me through auditions myself once I was born. You know those babies hooked up to lines and tubes in incubators in medical dramas? I was one of them on a number of occasions, and I once played a kid whose mother didn't survive childbirth, a strange man cradling me in his arms as he cried on cue before I was switched out for the kid who shared the role with me. I even had the part of a nine-month-old baby girl in a biopic at one point, but the funding for it suddenly fell through and it was never completed.

As I entered toddlerhood though, the acting jobs gradually started to dry up because no one wanted to hire a child who was unable to properly communicate at the appropriate level, could not be directed, and remained completely unaware of the cameras, but I didn't actually care. I know that might seem strange to some of the people who will read this, but what I recall from that time is bright lights that pained my eyes and made me too hot as well as reflecting off of many surfaces, hurting my eyes even more; adults I didn't know who would get in my face, holding my arms and shoulders as they positioned me just so; and absolutely crowds of people milling about everywhere. All this would send me into panics that had me seeking out a hidden corner where I would kneel and rock as I watched my kreisel spin, the brightly painted carousel horses just a blur and the rattling of the tin causing complaints from the sound engineers. You also have to remember that I was only two years old at the time, and toddlers are nothing but ego. All in all, acting in TV and movies was not a very successful career choice for a child like me.

With the money my folks had brought to the San Fernando Valley, as well as the incomes of my dad and me (less what had to be banked under the Coogan Law), the mortgage on the house was almost paid off by the time I was three. Not bad considering the fact that the most I'd ever worked in a day was two hours. So when Dad died in an accident on set, Mom decided to try and find a secretarial job to keep us both at least until I left school. It had been just a few months before that I had been diagnosed with childhood autism, my folks being told they were 'refrigerator parents', and they had heard of a couple of schools in the area that had special educational provisions, as well as a good local preschool that would accept me. So my education started with me crying and screaming, "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" repeatedly while banging my head on the floor until the teachers were forced to physically restrain me to prevent further injury, often getting injured themselves as I kicked and fought to be free of the pain their touch caused. It says something about their patience and persistence that they never gave up on me, and it wasn't long until I felt more secure, knowing that Mom _hadn't_ abandoned me and would be returning just a few hours later to pick me up and take me back home. I would even sit in the lap of one of the teachers for a cuddle once I'd been going there for a few months and had gotten to know her well enough.

There were problems when I graduated preschool and went on to kindergarten, but these were reduced by my old teachers preparing me for the inevitable change and I spent a fairly happy year there, although the HighScope Learning that had been adopted caused me enough problems that it had to be adapted for me. Other than that, however, I was able to follow the same curriculum as the other children, and I moved on to the first grade of Toluca Elementary School with my age peers, having fewer problems with the change than I'd had the year before.

During my first week of 'big boys' school', I entered the gifted program, this event being caused by the class bully. What happened was that during a rainy recess, the bully had snatched my baseball cap (which I insisted on wearing absolutely everywhere) and was holding it out of an open window. Miss Soderson, our teacher, thought she would have to throw older children out of her classroom upon hearing my tearful shrieks of, "No, no! Don't defenestwate my hat! Gimme my hat back!" and burst into the room only to see no one except her class of six and seven-year-olds. The bully sneered, "I was just kidding you around!" as she brought my cap back in and flung it at me, but the teacher wasn't fooled for a second, giving her a detention for bullying, and promising to write a letter to her mother about it. Then Miss Soderson said she'd be back soon before leaving the classroom, coming back after a few minutes with a laminated card that had a bunch of words on it. She told me to read all of the words on the card and not to worry about any I couldn't say, just to skip over them if I was still unable to read them after a couple of tries, so I did as she said. Throughout this, Miss Soderson was writing on a piece of paper as all the other kids in the class had fallen silent and come over to hear me pronounce such words as 'homecoming', 'electronic', and 'ketchup'. Once she'd finished, Miss Soderson grasped my hand and led me from the room, the bully's taunts of me being in trouble for being 'such a freak' obviously going unheard by the teacher. Of course, the bully was wrong and I wasn't in trouble for anything, rather, I was simply going for some further testing, the test I'd just taken having shown my reading age to be fourteen. I wound up having the Gifted Program being combined with my Special Ed, the first child this had happened with in the entire history of the California Department of Education.

✱   ✱   ✱

Several years passed without much else of note occurring, then the events which are the real focus of my story took place. It was New Year's Day in 1978, and I had been at my friend's house, storming out after an argument with him. I was walking past the Valhalla Memorial Park on my way home, sipping from a can of Mountain Dew I'd taken out with me, when something caught my attention, causing me to stop and stare. The neatly trimmed turf beside one of the graves appeared to be moving, and as I inched nearer to the fence for a closer look, I could see that it really _was_ moving. Then all of a sudden, the turf split and dirt began pushing upwards through it, a hand with a lot of flesh missing suddenly breaking out into the open air. As I looked on in horror and disbelief, a man's rotting body followed the hand and I dropped my drink, my shock benumbed ears not hearing the sound of the steel can denting on the concrete of the sidewalk as I wet myself with terror, my feet frozen by the same emotion before my muscles finally unlocked themselves enough for me to turn and flee the scene. I might have been only an Autistic twelve-year-old, but I still understood somewhat the significance of what I was witnessing. I took off for home at a rapid clip, the chafing of my wet jeans making me incredibly sore before I was even halfway there, but not slowing me down in the slightest.

I finally reached home and started pounding on the front door, shouting, "Mommy! Mommy!" over and over again, my language regressing due to my fear and panic, and Mom opened it after what felt like hours that must have actually been only minutes. I almost threw myself into her arms as I sobbed out the tale of what I'd seen, and she had to tell me to slow right down and use my words in order to understand me. At first, Mom thought I'd been having a dream or something, but eventually realized I was speaking the truth about having been wide awake throughout the whole thing. In spite of this, when I asked her what she was going to do about the zombie, Mom said there was nothing she _could_ do. If she rang the police, she'd likely receive thirty days jail time and a fine for wasting police time because they wouldn't believe the dead could come back to life, and they might take her away to a special hospital besides. All we could do was wait to see if other people saw the dead man walking around, then I could add my testimony to theirs.

Pretty soon, it was obvious that the man I had seen was not destined to be the only one, as within a few days, he was joined by several of his neighbors. In fact, there were many cemeteries in California that lost some of their residents, and there were also reports of cemeteries in New York and other places with empty graves that had recently been occupied, the only burials seeming to remain unviolated those where the deceased had been cremated. A few weeks after that, there was an absolute influx of new songs, stories, ideas for TV shows, and a whole range of other creative works. Because of this and all the zombies once having been creators whose work had been registered for copyright, it didn't take long for one particularly enterprising journalist to link the resurrections with the recent Copyright Term Extension. It seemed that on the day I'd seen the first zombie, the 1976 Copyright Act had come into effect, extending the copyrights on works for hire to seventy-five years from publication, and the copyrights on other works to life of the author plus fifty years. This had been pushed through Congress under the guise of incentivizing creativity despite opponents of term extension pointing out that many of the copyrights being renewed were held by deceased individuals, and the dead cannot be encouraged to create _anything_. However, it now seemed that the zombies which were literally popping up everywhere _had_ been incentivized to create by the new law and create they would, no matter _what_ condition they were in when the law was implemented.

When there were as many dead people as live ones in Burbank, Mom decided she'd had enough and started looking for a place to live where as few people as possible who'd had a copyright registered were buried. That's how we wound up living in Taney County, Missouri.

That isn't where my story ends, though. You see, it's now 1988, and earlier this year, Ronald Reagan signed the Berne Convention Implementation Act into law. So as I sit in my old tree house, slowly sipping a six pack of Coors Light, I'm watching the Brown Cemetery near our house very carefully. Mom thinks I'm being paranoid, that the events of California can't possibly happen here, but I think she's either got her head stuck in the sand or she truly doesn't realize the potential issues that could be caused by the fact that a school essay is copyrighted by the student who writes it as soon as they have a few sentences on paper. I'm hoping against hope that this new act isn't retrospective, because there were enough problems caused by the last one and that wasn't. I also wonder if Mom will realize I've started sucking my thumb at night again, or if she even notices how jumpy I've become.

Christopher 'Scooter' Hicks.

Author's Note: I'm not against copyright law, I just don't like excessive copyright legislation that causes problems and leads to disproportionate penalties.

**Author's Note:**

> Copyright © 2012 Romersa’s Protégé. Individuals and groups are free to copy and share this work for all purposes except large scale distribution, subject to credit being given and any derivatives being released under the same or a similar licence. All other rights reserved.


End file.
